“I do not consider it an insult, but rather a compliment to be called an agnostic. I do not pretend to know where many ignorant men are sure — that is all that agnosticism means.”

– Clarence Darrow, Scopes trial, 1925.

“Obstacles are those frightful things you see when you take your eyes off your goal.”

– Henry Ford (1863-1947)

“I’ll sleep when I’m dead.”

– Warren Zevon (1947-2003)

“There are people in the world so hungry, that God cannot appear to them except in the form of bread.”

– Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

“When you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

“The instinct of nearly all societies is to lock up anybody who is truly free. First, society begins by trying to beat you up. If this fails, they try to poison you. If this fails too, they finish by loading honors on your head.”

– Jean Cocteau (1889-1963)

“Everyone is a genius at least once a year; a real genius has his original ideas closer together.”

– Georg Lichtenberg (1742-1799)

“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it”

– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“While we are postponing, life speeds by.”

– Seneca (3BC – 65AD)

“Where are we going, and why am I in this handbasket?”

– Bumper Sticker

“God, please save me from your followers!”

– Bumper Sticker

“Fill what’s empty, empty what’s full, and scratch where it itches.”

– the Duchess of Windsor, when asked what is the secret of a long and happy life

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

– Mahatma Gandhi (1869-1948)

“Luck is the residue of design.”

– Branch Rickey – former owner of the Brooklyn Dodger Baseball Team

“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.”

– Mel Brooks

“Most people would sooner die than think; in fact, they do so.”

– Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

“Wit is educated insolence.”

– Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

“My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife you’ll be happy; if not, you’ll become a philosopher.”

– Socrates (470-399 B.C.)

“Advice is what we ask for when we already know the answer but wish we didn’t”

– Erica Jong (1942-)

“Show me a woman who doesn’t feel guilty and I’ll show you a man.”

– Erica Jong (1942-)

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”

– Maya Angelou (1928-)

“Egotist: a person more interested in himself than in me.”

– Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

“A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.”

– Gore Vidal

“Wise men make proverbs, but fools repeat them.”

– Samuel Palmer (1805-80)

“It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity.”

– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows.”

– Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

“Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.”

– Guy Davenport

“When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.”

– Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has no heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains.”

– Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“The opposite of a correct statement is a false statement. The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”

– Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

“We all agree that your theory is crazy, but is it crazy enough?”

– Niels Bohr (1885-1962)

“When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong.”

– Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983)

“In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it’s the exact opposite.”

– Paul Dirac (1902-1984)

“I would have made a good Pope.”

– Richard M. Nixon (1913-1994)

“In any contest between power and patience, bet on patience.”

– W.B. Prescott

“Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin.”

– Bob Metcalfe (inventor of Ethernet) on the trend of hardware speedups not being able to keep up with software demands

“Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“One of the symptoms of an approaching nervous breakdown is the belief that one’s work is terribly important.”

– Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)

“A little inaccuracy sometimes saves a ton of explanation.”

– H. H. Munro (Saki) (1870-1916)

“There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.”

– C. A. R. Hoare

“Make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler.”

– Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

“What do you take me for, an idiot?”

– General Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970), when a journalist asked him if he was happy

“I heard someone tried the monkeys-on-typewriters bit trying for the plays of W. Shakespeare, but all they got was the collected works of Francis Bacon.”

– Bill Hirst

“Three o’clock is always too late or too early for anything you want to do.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“A doctor can bury his mistakes but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”

– Frank Lloyd Wright (1868-1959)

“It is dangerous to be sincere unless you are also stupid.”

– George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“If you haven’t got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me.”

– Alice Roosevelt Longworth (1884-1980)

“A man can’t be too careful in the choice of his enemies.”

– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”

– John F. Kennedy (1917-1963)

“Logic is in the eye of the logician.”

– Gloria Steinem

“No one can earn a million dollars honestly.”

– William Jennings Bryan (1860-1925)

“Everything has been figured out, except how to live.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“Well-timed silence hath more eloquence than speech.”

– Martin Fraquhar Tupper

“Thank you for sending me a copy of your book – I’ll waste no time reading it.”

– Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

“From the moment I picked your book up until I laid it down I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”

– Groucho Marx (1895-1977)

“It is better to have a permanent income than to be fascinating.”

– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“When ideas fail, words come in very handy.”

– Goethe (1749-1832)

“In the end, everything is a gag.”

– Charlie Chaplin (1889-1977)

“The nice thing about egotists is that they don’t talk about other people.”

– Lucille S. Harper

“You got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going, because you might not get there.”

– Yogi Berra

“I love Mickey Mouse more than any woman I have ever known.”

– Walt Disney (1901-1966)

“He who hesitates is a damned fool.”

– Mae West (1892-1980)

“Good teaching is one-fourth preparation and three-fourths theater.”

– Gail Godwin

“University politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small.”

– Henry Kissinger (1923-)

“The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

– Charles de Gaulle (1890-1970)

“You can pretend to be serious; you can’t pretend to be witty.”

– Sacha Guitry (1885-1957)

“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

– Honore de Balzac (1799-1850)

“If women didn’t exist, all the money in the world would have no meaning.”

– Aristotle Onassis (1906-1975)

“I am not young enough to know everything.”

– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“Bigamy is having one wife too many. Monogamy is the same.”

– Oscar Wilde (1854-1900)

“The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.”

– General George Patton (1885-1945)

“Sometimes a scream is better than a thesis.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

“There is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

– George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“I don’t even butter my bread; I consider that cooking.”

– Katherine Cebrian

“I have an existential map; it has ‘you are here’ written all over it.”

– Steven Wright

“Mr. Wagner has beautiful moments but bad quarters of an hour.”

– Gioacchino Rossini (1792-1868)

“Manuscript: something submitted in haste and returned at leisure.”

– Oliver Herford (1863-1935)

“I have read your book and much like it.”

– Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

“The covers of this book are too far apart.”

– Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.”

– Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

“Too many pieces of music finish too long after the end.”

– Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971)

“Anything that is too stupid to be spoken is sung.”

– Voltaire (1694-1778)

“When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I’ve never tried before.”

– Mae West (1892-1980)

“I don’t know anything about music. In my line you don’t have to.”

– Elvis Presley (1935-1977)

“No Sane man will dance.”

– Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

“Hell is a half-filled auditorium.”

– Robert Frost (1874-1963)

“Show me a sane man and I will cure him for you.”

– Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961)

“Vote early and vote often.”

– Al Capone (1899-1947)

“If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one?”

– Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

“Few things are harder to put up with than a good example.”

– Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“Hell is other people.”

– Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

“Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.”

– Robert J. Oppenheimer (1904-1967) (citing from the Bhagavad Gita, after witnessing the world’s first nuclear explosion)

“Happiness is good health and a bad memory.”

– Ingrid Bergman (1917-1982)

“Friends may come and go, but enemies accumulate.”

– Thomas Jones

“You can get more with a kind word and a gun than you can with a kind word alone.”

– Al Capone (1899-1947)

“The gods too are fond of a joke.”

– Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)

“Distrust any enterprise that requires new clothes.”

– Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)

“The difference between pornography and erotica is lighting.”

– Gloria Leonard

“It is time I stepped aside for a less experienced and less able man.”

– Professor Scott Elledge on his retirement from Cornell

“Every day I get up and look through the Forbes list of the richest people in America. If I’m not there, I go to work.”

– Robert Orben

“The cynics are right nine times out of ten.”

– Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

“There are some experiences in life which should not be demanded twice from any man, and one of them is listening to the Brahms Requiem.”

– George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

“And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.”

“The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a ‘C’, the idea must be feasible.”

– A Yale University management professor in response to student Fred Smith’s paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

“Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?”

– H. M. Warner (1881-1958), founder of Warner Brothers, in 1927

“We don’t like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out.”

– Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962

“Everything that can be invented has been invented.”

– Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899

“Denial ain’t just a river in Egypt.”

– Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“A pint of sweat saves a gallon of blood.”

– General George S. Patton (1885-1945)

“After I’m dead I’d rather have people ask why I have no monument than why I have one.”

– Cato the Elder (234-149 BC, AKA Marcus Porcius Cato)

“He can compress the most words into the smallest idea of any man I know.”

– Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)

“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”

– last words of Pancho Villa (1877-1923)

“The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”

– Oliver Wendell Holmes (1841-1935)

“The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”

– Tom Clancy

“It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.”

– Mark Twain (1835-1910)

“It is better to be feared than loved, if you cannot be both.”

– Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), “The Prince”

“Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame.”

– Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)

“The President has kept all of the promises he intended to keep.”

– Clinton aide George Stephanopolous speaking on Larry King Live

“We’re going to turn this team around 360 degrees.”

– Jason Kidd, upon his drafting to the Dallas Mavericks

“Half this game is ninety percent mental.”

– Yogi Berra

“There is only one nature – the division into science and engineering is a human imposition, not a natural one. Indeed, the division is a human failure; it reflects our limited capacity to comprehend the whole.”

– Bill Wulf

“There’s many a bestseller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.”

– Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)

“He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire.”

– Sir Winston Churchill (1874-1965)

“Write drunk; edit sober.”

– Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

“I criticize by creation – not by finding fault.”

– Cicero (106-43 B.C.)

“Love is friendship set on fire.”

– Jeremy Taylor

“God gave men both a penis and a brain, but unfortunately not enough blood supply to run both at the same time.”

– Robin Williams, commenting on the Clinton/Lewinsky affair

“My occupation now, I suppose, is jail inmate.”

– Unibomber Theodore Kaczynski, when asked in court what his current profession was

“Woman was God’s second mistake.”

– Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

“This isn’t right, this isn’t even wrong.”

– Wolfgang Pauli (1900-1958), upon reading a young physicist’s paper

“For centuries, theologians have been explaining the unknowable in terms of the-not-worth-knowing.”

– Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

“Pray, v.: To ask that the laws of the universe be annulled on behalf of a single petitioner confessedly unworthy.”

– Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914)

“Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.”

– Henry Louis Mencken (1880-1956)

“Now, now my good man, this is no time for making enemies.”

– Voltaire (1694-1778) on his deathbed in response to a priest asking that he renounce Satan.

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In the Orient young bulls are tested for the fight arena in a certain manner. Each is brought to the ring and allowed to attack a picador who pricks them with a lance. The bravery of each bull is then rated with care according to the number of times he demonstrates his willingness to charge in spite of the sting of the blade. Henceforth will I recognize that each day I am tested by life in like manner. If I persist, if I continue to try,if I continue to charge forward, I will succeed.

I will persist until I succeed.

I was not delivered unto this world in defeat, nor does failure course in my veins. I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious. Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.

I will persist until I succeed.

The prizes of life are at the end of each journey, not near the beginning; and it is not given to me to know how many steps are necessary in order to reach my goal. Failure I may still encounter at the thousandth step, yet success hides behind the next bend in the road. Never will I know how close it lies unless I turn the corner.

Always will I take another step. If that is of no avail I will take another, and yet another. In truth, one step at a time is not too difficult.

I will persist until I succeed.

Henceforth, I will consider each day’s effort as but one blow of my blade against a mighty oak. The first blow may cause not a tremor in the wood, nor the second, nor the third. Each bolw, of itself, may be trifling, and seem of no consequence. Yet from childish swipes the oak will eventually tumble. So it will be with my efforts of today.

I will be liken to the rain drop which washes away the mountain; the ant who devours a tiger; the star which brightens the earth; the slave who builds a pyramid. I will build my castle one brick at a time for I know that small attempts, repeated, will complete any undertaking.

I will persist until I succeed.

I will never consider defeat and I will remove from my vocabulary such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools. I will avoid despair but if this disease of the mind should infect me then I will work on in despair. I will toil and I will endure. I will ignore the obstalcles at my feet and keep mine eyes on the goals above my head, for I know that where dry desert ends, green grass grows.

I will persist until I succeed.

I will remember the ancient law of averages and I will bend it to my good. I will persist with knowledge that each failure to sell will increase my chance for success at the next attempt. Each nay I hear will bring me closer to the sound of yea. Each frown I meet only prepares me for the smile to come. Each misfortune I encounter will carry in it the seed of tomorrow’s good luck. I must have the night to appreciate the day. I must fail often to succeed only once.

I will persist until I succeed.

I will try, and try, and try again. Each obstacle I will consider as a mere detour to my goal and a challenge to my profession. I will persist and develop my skills as the mariner develops his, by learning to ride out the wrath of each storm.

I will persist until I succeed.

Henceforth, I will learn and apply another secret of those who excel in my work. When each day is ended, not regarding whether it has been a success or a failure, I will attempt to achieve one more sale. When my thoughts beckon my tired body homeward I will resist the temptation to depart. I will try again. I will make one more attempt to close with victory, and if that fails I will make another. Never will I allow any day to end with a failure. Thus will I plant the seed of tomorrow’s success and gain an insurmountable advantage over those who cease their labor at a prescribed time. When others cease their struggle, the mine will begin, and my harvest will be full.

I will persitst until I succeed.

Nor will I allow yesterday’s success to lull me into today’s complacency, for this is the great foundation of failure. I will forget the happenings of the day that is gone, whether they were good or bad, and greet the new sun with confidence that this will be the best day of my life.

So long as there is breath in me, that long will I persist. For now I know one of the greatest principles of success; if I persist long enough I will win.